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18 March
Labtech
Long Reef
10:11 pm
Breathless and probably bleeding, I found the
light switch . . .
To my absolute horror, I saw that I'd
smashed open one of the cases - a glass case housing snakes! The floor
was alive with them!
The label lay crooked on a shard of glass
on the floor: death adders.
Two things happened simultaneously: the
lights flashed on and off overhead, and, from somewhere in the building,
piercing alarm sounded. The writhing mass of brown serpents seemed to
swarm to me. I froze, not knowing what to do . . . One snake came
dangerously close to my foot . . . and then it happened . . . it reared
up and struck my jeans.
10:20 pm
I had to get out of there! I knew that
death adders were the most venomous snakes in the world, and the room I
was standing in was alive with them. After the lion attack at the zoo,
and now this, I was convinced the vicious world of nature has it in for
me.
The internal alarm continued to blare
through the building, and I ran across the slithering beasts and back to
the door, flinging it open. Security would be here any minute. I'd pick
security and even Sligo's thugs over a room full of death adders any
day.
I hoped that the fangs hadn't penetrated
through my jeans into my skin, and that the sound of the alarm had
scared off Sligo's men. I couldn't feel anything strange yet, but the
alarm had done nothing to scare my enemies - at the other end of the
corridor, the two thugs were heading straight for me!
10:21 pm
I looked around in despair. Behind me,
the snakes. Ahead of me, Sligo's thugs. I had nowhere to go.
The two thugs suddenly stopped and I saw
looks of horror on their faces.
Death adders, excited by the lights in
the corridors, slithered with devastating speed right past me and
straight for my attackers!
For once things were going my way. The
thugs turned and ran, while I desperately backtracked and looked around
for somewhere to hide.
10:25 pm
I was hiding in the dark under a sink in
a small bathroom not far from the snake room. The security team has
arrived, and they were checking doors and talking on their portable
radios. At one stage, the door to the bathroom was opened and someone
waved a flashlight around, but luckily they withdrew, satisfied with the
minimal efforts to investigate the disturbance.
I waited anxiously for time to pass so I
could move on.
Everything has been quiet for a while. It
was time for me to come out of my hiding place and try to get out of
this maze of corridors and levels.
Silently, I climbed out and crept to the
bathroom door. I peered out into the moonlit corridor, and right at that
moment, a blinding headache hit me. It was so strong and so violent that
I fell against the wall. It wasn't just a headache - my eyes felt
pierced by splinters of light that came from somewhere inside my own
head. And there was a weakness in my legs that I couldn't understand.
A powerful nausea doubled me over. Pain
throbbed in both of my legs.
Dreading what I might find, I rolled up
my jeans.
Two tiny red wounds on the side of my
calf, left by the death adder's fangs, oozed pinkish fluid.
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